


What Divides Us

by mortalitasi



Series: ad lucem [1]
Category: Dragon Age, Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Adventure, F/M, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-06-02
Packaged: 2018-02-03 02:31:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1727849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mortalitasi/pseuds/mortalitasi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A compendium of memories, shared and alone. He's not quite used to having those, yet, but he's learning. Time is a good teacher, and Hawke is difficult to forget.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Divides Us

She summons storms for him.

Literally, he may add—he watches her pull a slaver in and send a wave of lightning coursing through him, turning the man into a convulsing crisp.

She takes care of the last of them on her own while Hadriana huddles in the corner of the room, mana spent, her wretched head bent. Varric and Merrill are all too happy to take shelter behind Hawke when her open palms crackle with electricity. A net of it unfurls around her, points of its gathering force caught fast there like glittering diamonds. The sheer power of the magic makes the lyrium in his skin hum in response. He can feel it building, as though the air around them is pressing in close, as though it’s becoming a physical thing, harder to move through.

Hawke draws herself up tight, the magic turning her figure rigid, and then her wrists snap _outward_ —and it all comes flowing out of her, a maelstrom of guttering light and jagged static. The only thing louder than the raging of the tempest are the dying screams of the slavers. Some of them try to edge around her, to the door in the south, but she frees one hand and tugs them back with a vortex of force magic that slides them right into the eye of the storm.

Two moments later it is all done, and what remains before them is a smoking heap of corpses, armor blackened, helms toppled, limbs splayed and split. Over the sound of the sizzling bodies he can hear Hadriana whimpering. He has never seen her so reduced.

She always held herself tall, high, as though she were perched on some peak no one else could even comprehend reaching. She kept her nails sharp and her lips dark, and blackened her eyes with kohl from Seheron—the exotics are denounced in Tevinter until they are convenient to your cause, and so while the magisters sip their expensive wines and speak ill of the Qun and the barbarians beyond their borders, they do not refuse the good cheeses of Antiva or the expensive enchanted phylacteries made in Val Royeaux.

He hates them. He hates them with a heat that burns deep in his heart from the moment he opens his eyes to the second he shuts them at night, trying to chase away the ghosts long enough to claim some sleep as his own. Things come back to him in sleep, sometimes, but he doesn’t remember his dreams—not enough to make sense of them, anyway. There are always impressions there after he comes to. Faint imprints of undefined faces, feelings of warmth or a distant sort of… safety. Closeness. Knowing. And every last bit of it slips away under the weight of the waking world.

Even if he remembered it all, everything, even his own name, he doubts he would be the same. He knows what it is to be someone else now. Whoever there was before Fenris, and before the magic, is not alive any longer.

That boy died the instant the brands touched him, seared away by the white-hot scorch of lyrium and fire. He cannot recall much of the days after the ritual. Only short, tortured snatches of days spent in bed, joints locked as his body rebelled against the lyrium, the fever lingering in his skin. He’d gritted his teeth so hard in an effort to stay the pain that when the servants had brought him bread the next morning he couldn’t even bite down on it—not the crumb nor the crust. He could only sip watered wine like an invalid and huddle into the sheets when the shakes came back again.

There are other things, of course, beyond the blur of the ritual and what happened after it. Years of servitude. Sleepless nights. Horrors he had to witness while keeping his counsel, things that made him sit in corners and taught him to always have his back to a wall in a room full of people—to always carry a blade no matter the protest.

Hawke doesn’t know much of these except what he’s told her, and that under the helpful influence of the Aggregio. But she is here anyhow, drawing up tides of elements in his defense. He tries to think back, if a mage has ever fought not just with him, but for him. She may be the first. He doesn’t want to dwell on the Fog Warriors. They are a secret shame of his, one he’s even divulged to her, if only in jumbled fragments. He wonders if she cares. She seemed to. Seems to. There she is, the glow of mana dying in her eyes, her black hair settling on her shoulders, chest heaving with the exertion of bringing forth so much in such a short time. He doesn’t know what to do with her. Sometimes she gives way and agrees, but others… she’s unlike any mage she’s ever met.

He’d told her that, once, and she just looked at him as though she wasn’t sure how to respond.

“You haven’t met enough mages, then,” she’d said, turning away and going back to watching the city pass beneath her balcony. I have, he wanted to say, I’ve met more than I could ever want to know, enough to last me five lifetimes over, but he’d only looked at her, outlined in Hightown’s evening light, her face soft and the stern line of her mouth relaxed, and he hadn’t the heart to continue that vein of conversation.

He’d settled for just stealing a glance or two every minute until she’d pushed away from the veranda and turned to face him, and he’d had to catch his breath when the scent of her newly-washed finery reached him. Sage and lavender, indulgent and sharp all at once. The magisters had always smelled of incense, frankincense and myrrh and redcoal brought in from Rivain—they’d burned tons of it to keep the odor of Minrathous at bay, and it hadn’t worked all too well. But she’d been clean, and the desire to embrace her had arrested him suddenly, suddenly enough that he’d had to take a step back and clear his throat. She hadn’t noticed.

“I think you’d have liked my sister. Bethany. She was a good girl,” she had told him. It’d been one of the only times she ever spoke of her, this Bethany, and Fenris knows how to identify the mark of loss in a voice. She probably realizes that. It’s difficult to predict what she’s thinking, since she’s always so tight-lipped about everything, never admitting her worries and always being the supporter instead of the supported. 

Perhaps that’s why Hawke never tells anyone how she feels. He suspects she’d rather everyone think she doesn’t have them, feelings. She’s surprisingly obtuse like that, in that she willingly gives others a target to focus their ire on without ever biting back, though that would be hard to guess at first contact with her personality. He knows she lets Carver think she doesn’t give half a wit about what happens to him and takes her brother’s abuses, uncomplaining. It bothers him. Fenris has seen guilt destroy better men, and the thought of that happening to Hawke is oddly… disturbing.

And now she’s stepping out of his way, letting him pass.

She doesn’t say anything while he questions Hadriana, only speaking to tell him the magister’s apprentice is his to do with as he wishes. He’d never thought he’d hear that. He’d never thought he’d escape. Maybe he can put this behind him. Maybe doing this will help. It doesn’t feel like it is. When his fingers close around Hadriana’s heart, crush it in her chest like an overripe fruit, all he feels is empty. Empty and angry.

No different than the last however many years he’s been on the run, no different from the day of the ritual.

He doesn’t really understand what he’s doing or saying when he turns around to address Hawke and the other two, doesn’t have much of an idea of what passes between them—until she puts a hand on his shoulder, more contact than they’ve ever had before, and it’s like she’s touched him with the tip of a charged lightning rod. He jumps back, shocked and frightened all at once, because the image of her alive with magic is what first comes to mind now when he thinks of her: Hawke with the length of her hair flowing back from her face on the updraft of mana, the irises of her eyes obscured by the radiance of the primal spell.

“Don’t _comfort_ me,” he’s saying, the words forming in his mouth quicker than he can track them. He goes on, something about excuses and mages, nothing he hasn’t said before, nothing she hasn’t heard, and when the breath rattles in his lungs, not enough to sustain him, he stops. A burning sting gathers under his eyelids, and he’s shamed at the ease with which the emotions overcome him. What does he have to show for having gained his freedom if what’s left of him is barely a wreck of a person, a shadow of someone who existed in a time he can’t even remember? Has it all been for nothing?

He keeps talking. It’s a quality that has had him punished greatly before.

“What has magic touched that it doesn’t spoil?”

It’s not Hawke that stares back at him now, just Aisling, a tired young woman in worn armor and beaten breastplate, her hair tousled around her pale face. He’s never seen her astonished, always was curious what it would look like on her, and he finds he doesn’t like it. There’s nothing supernatural in her eyes, only grey. She looks human. She looks hurt. He hears Merrill suck in the beginning of an offended gasp, but she is beyond his consideration. The blood is roaring in his ears. He’s chased away the one thing determined to stand at his side.

Aisling draws her hand back, but the expression doesn’t change. Something passes through her, miserable, so unlike the strength he’s come to associate with her, and knowing he’s the one who put it there makes him want to crawl out of his own skin.

“Nothing,” she says.

Varric looks to her in a tiny, tiny instant of genuine surprise—and then turns his eyes on Fenris, and what the elf sees there is more uncomfortable than any sort of judgment or accusation. It’s pity and understanding. He can’t do this. He can’t stay here. He mumbles something like that and turns away, thankful that he can’t see her anymore.

In the end, he’s reduced to doing what he does best: running.

 

* * *

 

Once, after he leaves, he comes back to the mansion in a lapse of bad judgment, bent on apologizing. He stares at the scarlet sash around his wrist before he goes in, just as he’s debating about whether to or not. The front door is open. It is summer, and the city is stifled with humid heat. Hightown air breathes cooler than most of the other districts, but that’s not saying much. The inside of the Hawke estate is chilly and quiet, dark, like the last time he was here two years ago.

Bodahn is arranging some letters on a desk by candlelight when he walks in. The dwarf looks up. It still surprises Fenris with how much trust he’s treated with in this household. It’s more than he’s ever had anywhere else. Bodahn just turns back to his work, his large hands sorting through the parchment.

“The master’s gone to her chambers,” he says casually, and Fenris freezes in his tracks. “Bit of a nightowl, our Lady Hawke. Best go if you wish to catch her before she retires for the night.”

He hopes the dwarf understands the silence is a thank you as he lopes up the stairs, his steps near to noiseless on the cold stone. He knows the way to Hawke’s room—he’s pictured himself taking it many times since that night, pictured what he’d say while she listened, imagined all her possible reactions. He’s eager for too much, most likely, as he always has been. High expectations have all but ended him. His heart is pounding in his chest when he slips by the door that hangs ajar and into Hawke’s room.

The place smells of her. There is no fire burning in the hearth, only a lantern on her nightstand, pulsing with warm, inviting light. Still, it’s not much, and he has to watch his step as he maneuvers around her things.

That’s when the panic seizes him. What’s he doing here? What can he possibly hope to accomplish, after what happened the last time they were together? After the way he just—abandoned her in the lurch? They’ve danced around each other since then, though she’s tried hard to convince him no change has come over her. She’s still rough-spoken and direct, forthcoming with her favor, still sensible and steadfast. Trustworthy. He can’t say as much about himself.

He doesn’t call out to her. Just edges past the footlocker nestled against the wall to his left; and that’s when he sees her.

She’s fallen asleep against the headboard of her bed with a book open on her lap, her hands clasped over its yellowed pages. She’s breathing evenly, undisturbed, stirring the strands of hair in front of her face. In repose, like this, it’s hard to believe she’s the same woman he’s seen tear opponents apart with force magic. He’s reaching out and the pointed fingers of his gauntlet have brushed against the fringe hanging over her brow before he realizes what he’s doing. She moves and turns into the touch, sliding down the headboard until she’s pillowed her head on her arms and the book has slipped to the mattress.

Fenris shrinks back like he’s been struck, and the tautness of his muscles only relaxes when he knows for certain she’s not awake.

She murmurs something into her pillow, inaudible—he knows then he can’t say anything. Not yet, at least. He retreats the way he came. He flees down the stairs like the hounds of Fereldan kennels are at his heels, taking two at a time. He slows himself down when he gets to the common room. He may have the reputation of a squatter, no need to add ‘madman’ to that, too. Bodahn still doesn’t look up when Fenris walks by. He stops before leaving, hand on the doorknob.

“Don’t… tell her,” he says as Bodahn turns and gives him a bright merchant’s smile.

“Not a word, messere.”

* * *

 

The next time she touches him, it is after the debacle in the Hanged Man. She halts him while Isabela and Merrill go on ahead of them.

“Stop,” she says, her voice so firm he’s surprised. “I know you’re upset. I understand.”

He draws himself up and back, ready to retaliate, when she lets go and steps away as well.

“Don’t take it out on Merrill. You apologized to me, once. I’m not asking you to do the same. Just leave her _alone_.”

“I—”

“You’re better than what you say to her,” Aisling tells him. Her eyes feel like a physical force. They’re certainly intense enough, a color that reminds him of the exquisite blown glass in the Minrathous markets, the ones that the artisans covered in silver and hung as censers over the entrances of the old temples still standing in the heart of the city, under the vigil of silent dragons made of stone. He puts a hand over the ring of warmth her own left on his wrist, as though holding it will keep it there. He can’t look at her when he talks.

“I wish I could believe that as readily as you.”

 

* * *

 

They’d been ready to depart when the argument broke out.

Even Isabela had excused herself to an acceptable distance from the quarreling siblings, though Fenris does not think it’s a true quarrel—it never is. It’s always Carver spitting venom like some possessed snake and Aisling bearing the remarks and jibes with astonishing tolerance. He’s familiar with that type of hostility. He holds it within himself, too, and lashing out comes as second nature when you’re full up on an emotion like that. He wonders if he looks as ugly when he’s doing that, as he looks at Carver’s enraged face with its features so like Aisling’s he sometimes has to stop to look at the similarities.

Carver doesn’t have the Amell eyes. Leandra had given them to her daughter. It’d been evident the minute you saw the two standing in a room together. It might be why Carver finds it so difficult to keep a conversation going with his sister for longer than a minute, and when that succeeds it more often than not turns into the an extolling of Hawke’s shortcomings, big and small—just like it is now. Aisling has her back turned to them, but he can see the set of her shoulders and the curl of her fists against her sides.

They haven’t had one in a while. An argument, that is. But it’s been simmering for a long time. It’s always evident in the way Carver treats her.

Sometimes it’s with grudging respect, others with a possessive protectiveness that rivals the most temperamental strays in the city. Whenever a disagreement is brewing, though, the manner changes. Everything becomes an indirect insult, a subtle jab, some kind of criticism or rude observation. Fenris has bristled at the accusations more than once, but never has spoken on her behalf. Hawke is more than capable of doing that on her own, and he knows with an instinctual certainty that she would storm the Black City itself for her little brother, though the _why_ still escapes him.

Varric is pretending to look out a window he’s not nearly tall enough to, but no one points it out or questions him because they’re too busy also pretending they can’t hear the row going on a few feet away from them. Isabela is amusing herself by staring at her boots as though they’re the most interesting thing to have come to Thedas in the last Age, and Fenris… Fenris is watching, as always, and remaining mute—a talent prized in Tevene slaves, one he never bothered cultivating till Kirkwall.

“I left her to you, and she _slipped away_ through your fingers!” Carver thunders. He is a tall man, and so is his sister; they are at eye-level with each other, but not close enough to touch.

“I know it was my fault,” Aisling retorts, with the secure surety of someone stating a fact. _It’s not,_ a voice inside Fenris says. “I don’t need you telling me as well.”

“It won’t hurt you to hear it, _Champion_ ,” Carver says, the anger cracking his voice. The epithet Kirkwall has given her sounds like a curse on his lips. “You were perfect. The golden child, the heir, the prodigy, _the guardian._ You were supposed to protect her!”

“ _I know_!”

The yell takes all of them off guard.

“I know,” she repeats, dragging a hand down the side of her face. “I failed, and she’s gone. And the man who—who did this is gone, too. That’s all I can offer.”

Carver stares at her with fire in his blue eyes. “It’s not good enough.”

“Nothing I do ever is, for you,” she says.

“I should have known. After Bethany, I should have known.”

It’s like a sudden winter has fallen over the room, muffling everything in an icy quiet. Isabela perks up and turns in the direction of the siblings, in time to see Aisling rip her cloak off the pegs by the mantle. She rounds on Carver like a spinning top, eyes unnaturally bright. Fenris recognizes that look, and what comes after it.

“ _Never_ use Beth like that,” she hisses, jabbing a finger at him. “Not for your stupid, selfish crusade. Reserve it for me. Do it again and I swear to the Maker, I will rip your tongue out by the roots.”

She trembles for an instant, as if she’s about to say more, but then she storms past him, the tails of her tunic flying. The door slams so hard in her wake that it opens again, hanging uselessly on its hinges. Carver seems to remember there are others standing there in the room with him, and he turns his gaze on them. For a moment he doesn’t look like anything more than a frightened boy, until the iron sheet of expressionlessness falls over his face again and he swivels on his heel before stomping his way out of the mansion.

Everything’s silent just for a second. Just one precious second.

“So,” Isabela starts, rocking back on her feet and elongating that last syllable. “Does this mean we have free run of the cellar?”

 

* * *

 

Night is bitterly cold in the Vimmarks.

The stars wheel above them in a cloudless sky, and the wind is howling in the chasm like a desolate soul. He doesn’t mind it. Anything is better than listening to the magisters taking slaves in the night, leading them away. They never came back in the morning. Not a one. But everyone in this camp will definitely be here come dawn. It’s a confidence he’s really not had the luxury to enjoy, one he’s not used to.

She’s still awake when Varric and Carver drop off into an exhausted slumber, huddled by the fire with her arms around her knees. The firelight halos her in orange, turns her hair to ebon in the dark. It’s like ink, running down her back and over her arms. It’s longer than it was when he kissed her those few years ago. It would take more than just a heartbeat to run his fingers through its entire length now. It’d been soft, like choice parts of the rest of her, but those thoughts won’t benefit anyone now. Still, the fact doesn’t stop him from thinking them, nor does it stop her from existing or being lovely enough to warrant distraction. Funny how that works.  

“Hawke,” he says, surprising both him and herself. She looks at him, startled, as though she hadn’t known he was still awake, and all he can focus on is the strangely symmetrical bow of her lips.

“What is it?” she asks, in her usual disinterested tone, but he knows better than to assume she is any of that. She’s always been good at hiding her more complicated of contemplations.

“Thank you. For asking me to come along again.”

The fondness in her expression frightens him. “Is there a reason I wouldn’t?”

It’s abruptly very difficult to swallow. “I just… am pleased. To see you. That’s all.”

He’s grateful for the fact that no one is conscious to have heard that particularly spectacular bumble when he hears a low whistle, followed by what can only be described as pleased cackle. It comes from Varric’s direction. Carver continues snoring like nothing’s ever going to be the matter again, but Varric…

“Smooth.”

Aisling laughs, quietly, and the sound sends a fluttering thrill through him.

Fade take the dwarf.

* * *

 

They’re all gathered in the foyer but Fenris is the only one that goes upstairs, at Aveline’s unstoppable insistence.

The little man Aisling calls her uncle has gone to the Gallows to deliver the news to Carver, and he hasn’t returned. Fenris doesn’t want him back. He’d heard the blame Gamlen had laid at Hawke’s feet—that seems all her family ever does, isn’t it? Blame her. And she loves them anyhow. If this is what all families are like, perhaps the loss of his memory is a good thing. Attachment is a foreign concept. He’s sure what he had with the Fog Warriors was a distant relative to it, but the magnitude of what Hawke inspires in him outweighs the joy that had died in him when Danarius and the hunters emerged from the jungle to take him back.

He has a hunch that slavers and all or not, whatever it is he—he _feels_ for Hawke, it would not wash away like silt on a riverbank, even if the phantoms of his life in Tevinter appeared today, right now, to wrest him away from what he has. He’d fight them tooth and nail to stay. Staying is… not his strong point. But that he wants to means something. He’s sure of it. It’s why he patters up the stairs and walks through the open doorway.

She’s sitting with her back to the door, hands on her knees, staring down at the floor with hollow eyes. Seeing her like that almost cows him into turning around and leaving, but for once, it’s not about him. It’s about her, and her grief. He could only watch while she bent over the patchwork corpse with Leandra’s mind, her fingers curling in the dirty wedding lace. She’d ripped the veil off and tossed it across the room before going back to looking at her mother’s bloodied face, so still it was like she’d been turned to stone.

When she’d started moving again, it was to pull a linen kerchief with the initials _A.H._ (he’d recognized the letters with some effort, but it hadn’t been the time to be proud of that) embroidered on the corner from the satchel at her side. She tied it around the cadaver’s head, pulled it down over the sunken visage, and laid it back with all the reverence of a Chantry Mother handling a holy brazier at mass. Then she’d stood and turned away, the gravel of the Darktown hovel grinding and crackling under the sole of her boot.

“Burn it,” she’d said to Aveline, and the guard captain had actually flinched.

“Carver—”

“—doesn’t need to see her like this. _Burn it_. And remember her as she was the last time you saw her.”

She’d walked ahead of them back to the estate, her stride long and smooth, but it was just a cover-up. She shuts down like that when she thinks things are too much, the way she’d shut down after she realized he was planning on leaving. It’s like a wall goes up between her and the rest of the world, and while she shelters behind it there is no one capable of breaching it. He’d seen its defenses appear that night they spent together.

All she’d said was “I see where this is going,” and had accepted his choice like it was the expected next step. He’s hoped more than once since then that she’d done anything else but just looking after him as he’d walked out—that she’d screamed, or cried, or had gotten impossibly mad, enough to hate him for the rest of her life. She hadn’t. Just kept her head down and gone on with her business as best she could, as she did with everything else. He doesn’t want to be another Carver. He wants to give something back. Just this once.

Fenris speaks before he loses his courage. “I don’t know what to say, but… I am here.”

She looks at him for an impossibly long moment before she moves her attention back to the floor. “Could you try? Something. Anything…”

She sounds lost. How is he to help her return? He’s not learned to do that. Not for himself, not for anyone. It’s the effort that counts. He hopes.

“They say death is only a journey,” he tells her, stumbling over the words like a halfwit. There couldn’t be a more wrong time for that. He steps closer. “Does that help?”

It doesn’t look like it does.

“I suppose they say you go back to the Maker when you die,” she agrees in a whisper. She hangs her head and the urge becomes too strong—he sits himself down by her, feeling the mattress dip with his weight. She’s close enough to touch now, close enough that their shoulders are but a breath away from brushing together. It’s like standing by a raging bonfire, or it at least the nearest equivalent he has at the moment. She looks at him for one short second and he realizes that even if he did know what to say, it would not make a difference.

“I’ve heard that too,” he says, turning to her. “To be honest, I don’t think there’s much point in filling these moments with empty talk.”

She links her fingers together, knitting them over one another.

They’re parts of a fighter’s hands, scarred at the knuckles and lean from years of hard work, strong and sure. She’s a scrapper as much as she is a mage, more than capable of keeping her own in a brawl, and Isabela’s acquaintances at the Hanged Man allow her to practice those skills often. He remembers them taking the whole place by storm the night some gang Isabela had upset waited for them in the tavern. She’d grabbed a man as tall as her by the throat, lifted him for a full heartbeat with one hand, and bodily flung him onto a table. The table hadn’t survived, and the man had broken at least three ribs.

“You fight like a madwoman!” Isabela had yelled to her over the cacophony of cracking wood and shouted curses in Antivan.

She’d ducked under the swing of another bodyguard and floored him with a knee to the gut. “And that’s a bad thing?”

“ _I love it_!”

Hawke comes alive when she’s moving, when she’s in the thick of battle. The motionless woman sitting beside him doesn’t seem anything like the force of nature he’s followed into unbelievable odds more than once—and yet they’re the same person, both of those contained in a single personality. He knew, logically, that she must have had another side, a vulnerable one, but seeing it so suddenly and under these circumstances—it’s difficult. And he’s not in any position to advise her, or give her what she wants, though he’s here. He’s not sure he even could, if there was something tangible to give.

“You’re right,” she says, giving him a weak smile. “And you’re not that often, so savor it.”

He tries to return the gesture. “I will.”

They go on like that for a while longer, lingering in silence, and once he thinks she’s going to put her head to his shoulder, but it doesn’t happen. She hasn’t been sure about how to approach him for a while now. That much, he knows. He wishes he had the confidence to tell her to lean on him. He’s about to say so, Maker damn the consequences, when she reaches over and takes his hand. It’s difficult to lace her fingers through his with the gauntlet he’s wearing, but it doesn’t stop her. He breathes in sharply though he doesn’t try pulling away. He can feel the lyrium reacting to her—and it only dies down because he wills it to.

Aisling slumps, like all the energy keeping her up has been siphoned from her, and something rough and hurtful moves in him at noticing her shoulders are shaking.

“He changed her hands,” she rasps. He lifts his head and acts as though he can’t see the tears dripping from her chin to the collar of her tunic, beading there like droplets of dew, remnants of a dawn passing into memory.

Fenris has nothing to say, nothing that would erase the traces of the nightmare they emerged from hours ago. So he tightens his grip when her arm trembles and stays there, hoping that somehow, it will be enough for them both.

 

* * *

 

Hawke leases horses for the bigger part of the journey out to the Vimmarks.

She plans to leave them at the last outpost before the abandoned reach of the chasm they’ve pinpointed as their destination. They’re Anders horses, stout and wiry and able to go for days without water, with tails that flag like battlement banners when they ride at full gallop and strangely pretty muzzles that remind Fenris of curved vases.

One of them is a grey-white gelding full of eager energy and sinewy strength. Carver takes that one, because the weight of full templar armor is something that doesn’t stop him from trotting or bouncing with vigor; and since horseback riding is not something dwarves are famed for, Varric is consigned to sharing. He doesn’t seem to mind too much, except when the tips of the elbows of Carver’s regalia dig into his arms.

The other horse is a willowy filly, a color Hawke calls ‘sabino’ in a surprisingly good Antivan accent, with a light blaze running down between her eyes and a gossamer mane that’s feather-soft. He has no idea how to even begin moving around the creature when Hawke takes her by the bridle and leads her over to their group. The filly watches him with liquid eyes, intelligent and knowing but pure and unassuming at the same time. It’s unsettling to be near something with such clarity of self—that is so sure of what it is and how it goes about that.

There are no horses in Tevinter, only the beasts of burden and oxen that draw the slave-driven carts along the burrow trails running through the Minrathous streets. Those rumble and creak as they move. The single sound the horses make are a comforting _clop clop_ when they walk on hard ground and the occasional snuffle or snort. He’s seen some before, glimpses of them, in Seheron, and the places he passed through while on the run, but never touched them or stood so close to one. All he can do is blink back at the filly until Hawke turns her so the side is facing them and looks at him expectantly.

“What?” he says, though he has a creeping suspicion of just what already.

“The day isn’t getting any longer,” she says with a hint of a smile. “I’ll help you on first.”

“Hawke, I—”

“It’s not that bad, I promise. We won’t go far enough for you to get saddle sores. Yet.”

He gulps past the lump in his throat. “Maybe I should go with Varric.”

She smiles wider. A rare thing. “Scared?”

“I am _not._ ”

Just reluctant to be so close to her. If the prospect bothers her, she doesn’t show it. She turns and bends, cupping her hands together in preparation of giving him a boost. Her armor glints in the sunlight as she does so.

“Make sure to step up with your left and lift your right. Don’t want to go up backwards, do you?”

He moves toward Hawke and the filly under Carver’s judging eyes.

Fenris wishes he could turn about and stuff the boy’s mouth with a sock to stopper any stupid exasperated sighs he plans on giving. Steeling himself, the elf does as instructed and his eyes go wide at the effortlessness with which Hawke hefts him upward to the saddle. The filly isn’t put out in the least. She just shakes her magnificent head to clear the hair from her sight. Fenris is still adjusting to the feeling of sitting so wide when Hawke swings herself into place right in front of him. The ends of her loose ponytail brush against his nose and he has to stop himself from jerking away at the pleasant sensation it causes for him. There’s a disconcerting lack of space between them, and a too-comfortable fit between her back and his front. And her hips—

“Can we _go_ now?” Carver asks testily, kicking his heels into the gelding’s sides. They start off at a jumping trot.

“Of course. But you’re going the wrong way, fearless leader mine,” Hawke says and takes the filly’s reins. They make a slow circle while Varric laughs merrily and Carver scowls deep enough to put Fenris’ glowers to shame.

“I knew that.”

Varric holds onto Carver’s arm as the gelding turns around. “Sure thing, Junior.”

“Shut up.”

Aisling takes the lead and guides them down a side-road that she explains will meet up with a forgotten portion of the Imperial Highway that will take them up to a pass in the Vimmarks that used to be a Tevene garrison, though now it’s only the last place that offers food and board before the uncharted blind spot on the map—the place they want to go to. It’ll take them a week at most to make it to the garrison, and from then on in it’s on foot. A type of travel Fenris is more accustomed to than he’d like. It’ll be easier than this. At least on foot he’ll have some _room_ , and he won’t feel like he’s about to topple over every time the horse takes a step _._

As if she’s read his thoughts, she looks at him over her shoulder. Her profile hasn’t gotten any less striking over the years.

“You have to hold onto something if you don’t want to fall off,” she says in a low voice. “Your balance will get better in a few days, don’t worry.”

It’s not that he worries about. He hesitates for a good while before he lays a hand at her waist, waiting for even longer to curl his fingers into the curve of it as far as his gauntlet allows, the metal clinking against her mail tunic. She’s firm and defined. He can’t help leaning in, just ever so slightly. He might be imagining the change in her pattern of breath, or maybe it’s most beneficial to him to keep thinking it’s just his imagination. Whichever it is, she clears her throat and speaks up.

“We have to reach the edge of the Planasene by nightfall if we want to make good time. That means riding hard.”

Varric frowns. “Listen to you, talking like that and the Rivaini not here. Shame.” 

“We won’t have time for talk in a little,” Hawke informs him, and lets the filly have more rein. “Carver. Keep north and right. We’ll talk once we come to the crossroads a ways out of the forest.”

“I hear you.”

“Good.”

Then she clicks her tongue, twice, quickly, and lightly taps the filly with her toes. Apparently it’s some sort of silent signal because the horse lurches forward with a lollop and then starts to _run_. Fenris nearly breaks his nose on the back of Aisling’s breastplate, and stops himself short only by winding an arm around her and steadying himself with the flat of a palm on her back. Too much contact all at once but it’s either that or tumbling headfirst off the horse. That may just be a preferable alternative to having to hold Hawke like this—like three years ago never happened.

He can hear the drumming rhythm of the gelding’s canter behind them. The pace isn’t letting up any time soon, and Hawke is available with uncomfortable immediacy.

This is going to be a long trip.

 

* * *

 

He shifts in his seat for what must be the hundredth time, juggling the book in his hands.

It’s still odd to be in her company without the armor. He doesn’t feel vulnerable, just… bare. But she doesn’t seem to catch onto that particular emotion, or if she does, says nothing about it. Hawke is curled up on the other side of the bed, scratching away in her journal. Learning she kept one surprised him. She’s such a private person—didn’t seem the type to put her thoughts down somewhere where it could all be seen. Hawke, however, is human, and alive, and he supposes she needs to write it all out lest it harm her. He lost the privilege to being privy to it all when he walked out that door. Yet she treats him the way she always has. Even lets him practically live here.

The mansion is lonely. He knows the place, inside out, but more often than not it feels too big for him. He somehow ends up on Hawke’s doorstep every time. They’d started his reading lessons in the study, but Hawke is a sprawling kind of sitter, and she’d eventually convinced him to move them to her chambers. It’s quieter in here, secluded, and the bed is big enough for them to both sit on it without having to touch or be too close. Now she has him reading to himself, not aloud—it’s been hard, not being able to have his own voice as guidance, but she’d told him that it’s how children read, and that he’d never feel ready to advance to the next step unless he just tackled it head-on.

Thankfully, he’s an expert at rushing into things he’s not prepared for, so he’d taken to the challenge with a single-minded fervor that Hawke appreciates.

“Fast learner,” she’d commented as she handed him one of her favorites, an account of early Fereldan history by one Brother Genitivi. “You know the words. Just not how to read them. Ask me if you’re having trouble with anything.”

He sighs, frustrated, and looks up at her.

“Why in Andraste’s bloody name does the word ‘knife’ have a ‘k’ in front of it?”

Aisling closes her journal, marking the page with her finger. “I haven’t the slightest. I suppose that’s simply how it is. It must seem odd to someone who’s learning just now.”

“Odd doesn’t begin to describe it,” he grouses, rubbing at his eyes. Reading is surprisingly strenuous. He’s not going to give up.

“But you like it,” Aisling says with a knowing look. “I know you do. You’re a curious man, and reading is the best way to broaden the mind.”

He frowns at her. “Are you sure you’re just a mage? Perhaps there’s a scholar hidden in there somewhere.”

She chuckles, though it doesn’t sound very happy. “I’m no Circle academic.”

“Would you… like to have been?” Fenris asks. He doesn’t know where the question came from.

“My parents made that decision for me,” Aisling says, and shuts her journal. “My father thought living outside the Circle was best for me. Us. Bethany—and I.”

He turns to her, crossing his feet, shocked by his own brazenness. “I inquired to hear _your_ thoughts. Not your father’s.”

That startles her, and for a moment her gaze is totally unassuming. She’s surprised that it’s her he’s asking after. Not many do that, he’s noticed.

Aisling looks down at her hands. “The Circle isn’t a choice for many either. But when I think about what we had to do, to stay hidden. To keep safe. What it meant for Mother and Carver. Was it worth it? My father was Circle-taught. He passed on as much as he could to us, but I always wonder if I could have learned more. About what I am. About if I could have… not had to do so much on my own.”

“You are not weak.”

Startled again. “They must have thought so too, or they’d never have trusted me with the twins.” Her expression twists, as though she’s in pain, and he knows immediately what she’s thinking. “I’ve said too much.”

“ _No_ ,” he says with vehemence enough to take him aback. He shouldn’t be surprised at the intensity of any given emotion by now. “No. I asked, and you obliged.”

She smiles at him then, and it’s like the sun breaking through a shroud of clouds on a stormy morning, the most genuine he’s seen on her in the longest time. It stops his every thought. Why have the years not dampened this? Maker, she makes him feel like a boy. Does she have the same reactions? He can’t tell, but she’s shown him before. He’s starting to think it wouldn’t be so bad to try again.

Aisling lowers her head, almost bashful. “Thank you.”

He picks up his book again and leans against the headboard, smiling a little himself. “Always a pleasure.”

 

* * *

 

The light of a pearly grey dawn is filtering through the high window outside of Hawke’s chambers when she half-wakes up and turns into him, nuzzling into the crook of his neck. He raises a hand to receive her and lets his fingers play along her scalp, fascinated at the contrast of the white-blue of the lyrium on his knuckles and the black of her hair.

“That feels nice,” she mumbles into his shoulder.

This is a very seldom-appreciated part of her, when her guard is down and she’s too sleepy to care about anything else or the upkeep of appearance. This is the Hawke he sees where others think there is only a Champion. A lot of them probably wouldn’t even believe the kind of beginnings she had in this city. He’s seen her wearing everything from smuggler’s leathers to the most finely-crafted silverite armor one can afford in Kirkwall, and perhaps there are some who think the person miraculously evolves with the make of a breastplate. They are wrong.

“I slept like a log,” Aisling says, cracking one eye open.

“You did.”

“And you’re awake and functional at this hour. I find that hard to believe.”

“Some of us rise before noon,” he replies playfully. It earns him an uncommitted slap on the chest.

“We’ve changed a lot, haven’t we?” she adds. His arm tightens around her shoulders and he cranes his head to the left so he can press his lips to her temple.

“That we have.”

And he is glad for it. 


End file.
